Pixels begone!

Incredibly useful, thank you for sharing this! ✨

Some random things I found: TSR causes lots more GI ghosting vs DLSS (maybe latter just gives Lumen more time each frame?). GI quality below High will have a lot of artifacts, but High to Epic isn't much of a difference. SIRCAA and Skadovsk are two places that have bad noise no matter the settings.

I definitely get a fair amount of artifacting but nothing too bad. Where the recent giant patch helped a lot is overall performance, which allowed me to push settings up + one of the really bad artifacts I've had before (dark trails) seemed to only occur at sufficiently low fps, and is gone now.

Even the areas deep underground can be thrilling to explore. The sheer geometric detail and attention to detail makes some moments look like urbex video footage. To me, firefights, mutants and loot are kind of secondary to sheer rewards of discovering new locations here. A really unique experience.

The way light bounces inside these structures is absolutely stunning. I bet this didn't come "free" and the devs went to great pains to get Lumen to look this good. In some spots you can see how structures are built from a myriad of watertight modules, prob. to ensure good SDF and min. leaks etc.

... but baking curvature on pure lowpoly geo is a bit of a pain. The only software I found that properly bakes lowpoly curvature is Modo. I wish there was a way to bake curvature directly in Unity.

That's something I'm very interested in! Hotspot UVs are an amazing idea, but I'm really torn about identical appearance of convex and concave edges, especially with materials that look very different on exposed edges. So far what I tried was blending based on curvature instead of AO,

I think these images are from around 2011. I modeled a bunch of stuff from the Yanov station near Pripyat and was trying to use then recently released CE3 SDK to render them. It was really fun to puzzle the scene together from limited photo references and compare it to the level in Call of Pripyat.